Aug 29: The Pirates! Band of Misfits

"Pirate Captain sets out on a mission to defeat his rivals Black Bellamy and Cutlass Liz for the Pirate of the year Award. The quest takes Captain and his crew from the shores of Blood Island to the foggy streets of Victorian London."

Directed by: Peter Lord & Jeff Newitt, Rated: PG, 88 minutes

Aardman Animations has always been a leader in animated movies, creating imaginative films with hilarious characters. Each one of their films is a work of art and watching it leaves you baffled at the time and effort put into making such a thing. With The Pirates! Band of Misfits, all of those glorious visuals are there with equally impressive sets and decorations but there's really not a lot else. The story's way too messy, throwing in as much as possible, just as quick, and while there are a handful of laughs, it's really not as entertaining as any of the Wallace & Gromit movies (or shorts), or even Chicken Run, both properties of Aardman. It's really disappointing too, because this film packs one hell of a voice cast and sets up a world with so many possibilities. 

I'm afraid to revisit this "classic", thinking my naive younger self just loved it because of the talking chickens. 

The Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant) has always wanted to win the Pirate of the Year Award. Each he, he tries his hardest to outdo his rival pirates but always comes up short. His pirate career has become a sort of joke in his "community" and he knows that if he can't win it this year, it's the end of pirating for him. So The Pirate Captain sets out with his loyal crew in hopes of amassing the most booty possible and thus winning the highly coveted award. After several failed attempts at looting passerby ships, The Pirate Captain comes across Charles Darwin's (David Tenant) ship, who recognizes that the Pirate's "parrot" is actually the thought to be extinct Dodo bird and tells the Captain that riches could be had with presenting the bird at a science convention in London. Of course, London is hope to Queen Victoria, pirates' most feared nemesis, and you imagine that sneaking into the England capital to present a bird is a rather difficult task. Thus, you have the majority of the plot for The Pirates!. There's much more that happens, but it all jumps from scene to scene very quickly without giving the audience enough time to relish in the beauty on the screen. There's so much going on in each scene, with attention paid to the smallest of details, that it really is a shame more time isn't spent in each location. 

Just one of about a hundred different scenes... in a 88 minute movie. 

With pitch-perfect stop-motion animation from Aardman, The Pirates! is saved from being another run-of-the-mill kids movie. Each scene is a joy to watch and makes you respect the film-making process even more. At times, you forget you're watching something animated as the backgrounds and scenery look so realistic. However, it's very disappointing when the story can't keep up with such visuals. It's an even bigger shame because this film had to have taken years to make and at no point in the process did the animators and/or screenwriters realize it needed something more. The voice cast, however, is superb, and each of the actors involved had to have an absolute blast filming their respective parts. Along with Grand and Tenant, Martin Freeman, Salma Hayek, Brendan Gleeson, Anton Yelchin, Jeremy Piven, and even Al Roker provide their voice talents, with most of them not even being recognizable as they really go out of the box with their characters. Had these actors been given a little more room to play with, I feel The Pirates! could have turned into a much more entertaining movie. 

To give you an idea of how "contained" it all is, Salma Hayek has about two lines in the entire film. 

While I would not go as far as telling you to avoid the film, The Pirates! is nothing to get too excited about. It's funny, yes, but only in it's few moments of genius (because they really are genius). Unfortunately, those few moments are almost immediately throw overboard with a very messy story that jumps around way too quickly as though it needed to be molded into something you could present to a low-tolerance, weak patience-filled child. Aardman has always been known as throwing in plenty of adult jokes and references, and while The Pirates! has a couple, it never embraces that style we're used to seeing. 

The Good:

superb visuals that shows how far you can really go with stop-motion animation

The Bad:

a messy story that tries too hard to appease the little ones...

The Ugly:

...while nearly forgetting about the adult fans that helped build the studio

Overall: 6.4/10

Trailer: